Curriculum and Year Group Information

At Thundersley Primary School, we understand the importance and significance of reading from an early age. We encourage our children to read every day and we have a school reading raffle each week. Children who have read 5 times or more within the week are entered into either the KS2 or KS1 and EYFS draw where they can win a brand new book, celebrating their success and hard work.

At our school we follow a colour banded system where as children become more confident and able readers they take home books from different colour bands. The initial colour bands are primarily phonics based, helping children to apply their phonic knowledge. Children can also borrow any book they’d like to read from our fabulous and vibrant new school library to supplement their levelled book.

Phonics

At Thundersley Primary School, we follow the Letters and Sounds programme and use the Jolly Phonics scheme to supplement this with rhymes and actions for each phoneme (sound) to make them more memorable. Initially, children’s listening skills are developed through the use of music and environmental sounds. In Foundation Stage, children are then introduced to phonemes linked to the letters of the alphabet, as well as the other 16 phonemes such as ‘igh’ and ‘ch’. Children learn each of these phonemes with the accompanying action from Jolly Phonics. They then learn to sound out and blend these phonemes together in order to read a variety of words and break them down to help spell them correctly.

In Year 1, children then learn the alternative ways of spelling phonemes, for example ‘oy’ and ‘oi’. The children are taught where these different spellings are usually found within words. ‘Oy’ for example is usually at the end of the word, whereas ‘oi’ is typically in the middle. At the end of the year the children take the national Phonics Screening Check, which involves reading 20 real and 20 pseudo-words to test their knowledge and understanding.

In Year 2 and beyond, children consolidate their knowledge of phonics, learning and applying different spelling rules, including for plurals and different verb tenses.